Tears universally exist across cultures and throughout history. The Bible records many examples of tears both from humans and from God. In this paper I will explore tears in culture and in various religious traditions. I will explore tears in theology and describe some possibilities for improving churches based on a theology of tears. This work is not an exhaustive view of tears in the Bible or in theology. It will, however deal with the key ideas and theological conflicts concerning the subject. Specifically, I will provide a biblical hermeneutic of crying to assist the church to minister to those who cry.

Tears in History, Culture and Religion

Humans enter the world with tears, and tears provide a primary means of communication for the early parts of life. Kimberly Christine Patton and John Stratton Hawley observe, “Among the very earliest expressions of distress in the infant’s range, tears remain a profound existential signifier at all stages of human life, particularly in the face of fear, loss, or despair. Crying is a response of the parasympathetic nervous system that helps return the stimulated organism to homeostasis.”[i] While some primate infants exhibit behavior similar to human crying to summon parental care, humans are the only animals able to cry as adults.[ii] From an evolutionary viewpoint, adult crying manifests as a means of signaling defenselessness and surrender or of summoning help from others within the crier’s social network.[iii] Adult human tears appear as a uniquely human behavioral phenomenon.

Pastor Wes Shortridge presents a short history of the astounding revival that occurred on both sides of the American Civil War and how it impacted the nation for decades.

Introduction

America in 1861 presents a painful and complex chapter in history. God, however, had a plan for the American people, and God remained present during the painful chapter. God appears most in this period in the soldiers fighting the Civil War. Along the banks of the Rappahannock River in 1863, both armies faced one another in battle; however, both armies also faced a revival of religion. The paradox of revival in two armies facing one another presents an example of God’s ability to use revival to accomplish His purposes in spite of human conflict.

“Prayer in ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s Camp” (1866).
Drawn by F. Kramer, Engraved by J. C. Buttre.

The Circumstances of the Revival

Pre 1861 America While many modern interpreters of the American situation before the Civil War view the war as a simple moral war in which one party supported slavery and the other party arose as a benevolent deliverer of an oppressed people, the actual situation in America proved much more complex. Americans, from both North and South, had sanctioned or at least ignored slavery for nearly a century. White men ruled the country, and obvious examples of misogyny and racism rarely arose as issues in a land that voiced the values of liberty and equality. The powerful elites from both North and South worked to protect the prominent position of the light-skinned and masculine. The first and second Great Awakenings had revived religion in America, but paternalistic racism remained unaddressed. Religion focused mostly on benevolence within the paternalistic system rather than valuing or empowering all humans.

Slavery in America found support in the hermeneutical principles of American religion in both the North and the South. Mark A. Noll describes the unique hermeneutic of America:

Americans held to a hermeneutic that was distinctly American. The reason they held it so implicitly was precisely that this hermeneutic—compounded of a distinctly Reformed approach to the scope of biblical authority (“every direction contained in its pages as applicable at all times to all men”) and a distinctly American intuition that privileged commonsense readings of scriptural texts (“a literal interpretation of the Bible”)—had functioned as the vehicle through which the Bible was unleashed in the creation of the American civilization.[1]

In a town called Rogues’ Harbor, because of its many rogues and outlaws, Peter Cartwright found salvation from a life of debauchery. He experienced conviction of sin and redemption during the Kentucky Revival in the early 1800s. The revival itself faded due to infighting and influence from outside groups such as the Quakers, but Cartwright managed to live a life that brought revival to frontier America for the next sixty-five years. He stands as a giant in his influence in the Methodist Church and in American religion in general. His ability to sustain the fire of revival throughout his life provides an example to those seeking to sustain revival in the church today. W. S. Hooper in his introductory statements at a jubilee celebrating Cartwright’s unprecedented fifty years as a Methodist presiding elder observes Cartwright’s influence: “The whole West recognized his superiority, his supremacy. He was the primate of all Prairiedom. For two generations he ruled that realm.”[1]

Once while staying in a hotel in New York City, the clerk placed the elderly Cartwright in a shoddy room on the top floor. Cartwright took offence to the slight and began ringing the bell for the steward. He summoned the poor steward up the stairs several times and finally asked him for a hatchet. The poor steward inquired for Cartwright’s need for the woodsman’s tool and Cartwright replied that on the frontier when a man feared losing his way in the wilderness he would blaze the trees with a hatchet mark. Cartwright wanted to blaze the corners of the hotel corridor in case a fire started and he needed to escape. The clerk promptly moved Cartwright to a better room on the second floor. Cartwright blazed many trails in his life, and he constantly used frontier manners and wit to promote his primary cause—Jesus. In this paper, I will explore Cartwright’s success in extending the Kentucky Revival to three states and the next two generations of Americans. His motives and methods provide insight into sustaining revival to the current generation.

Sustained Revival Through Missional Focus

Peter Cartwright used his fists, politics, biting rhetoric, tent revivals, and home meetings to advance his cause. He sustained the revival fires of his conversion in the face of many critics of his methods because he never wavered on the motive behind his bold methods. He always sought to promote Jesus among those who desperately needed Christ. Phillip M. Watters, a key Cartwright biographer, observes Cartwright’s unyielding motive:

We find one central source dominating all these activities, as the life had its energy from one supreme source. Christ was its fountain, its wellspring of power; and to reveal Christ to others, to proclaim the good news of salvation to lost men—this was the central purpose, the controlling motive of Peter Cartwright’s career.[2]

Cartwright sustained the revival for two generations because he never lost sight of the source and purpose of revival.

Advancement into New Territory

Peter Cartwright was born on September 1, 1785 in Amherst County, Virginia, to an agnostic father and a Methodist mother a year and a half before their marriage. At his birth Indians still attacked the frontier settlers of Amherst County. His family moved to the edge of the frontier again in 1791 to what would eventually form the state of Kentucky. In 1793 they moved to an area called, due to its outlaw activity, Rogues’ Harbor. Cartwright adopted the life of the rogue and used playing cards and a racehorse to make a living in his early teens through gambling. God convicted him of his sin at seventeen through a sermon by John Page during James McCready’s Kentucky Revival in the early 1800s. He sold his racehorse and allowed his mother to burn his playing cards. Cartwright found salvation and determined to live a life in the wild frontier that honored Christ.

His family soon moved again into new and uncharted territory in 1802 to the mouth of the Cumberland River. The new territory had no Methodist churches, and Cartwright inquired as to the possibilities for faith in the new land. His leaders surprisingly gave him a license to exhort (a lay credential in the Methodist church) and papers authorizing him to explore the establishment of a circuit in the new territory. He found himself an eighteen year old with the authority to establish a new work in a new territory. Cartwright managed to establish the Livingston Circuit with seventy new members. The legendary Bishop Asbury ordained Cartwright as a deacon (a Methodist credential that allowed him to be a circuit riding preacher and establish churches) in 1806. Four years later Bishop McKendree ordained him as an elder (the highest credential level). In 1812, Bishop Asbury appointed Cartwright a presiding elder, a key leadership position that Cartwright would hold for an unprecedented fifty years. He spent the remainder of his life establishing circuits and churches in the emerging frontier eventually moving to Illinois. He was part of the formation of three conferences: Tennessee (1812), Kentucky (1820), and Illinois (1824).